then burning down love
by irnan
Summary: "Potter, I don't think you've met my sister Petunia."


_this is a disclaimer._

_**AN:** The bit about mistakenly-camping-in-a-graveyard-in-the-fog actually happened to my grandfather and his friends once when they were boys. The way he told it, it was the best story ever. Also, I made up the whole best man thing out of whole cloth only to realise it doesn't match in the least with what we saw of Bill and Fleur's wedding. But I _liked_ it, so it stayed...  
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**then burning down love**

Marauder holidays never turn out well. James has learned this through trial and error and divers alarums, not to mention that time they got lost in the fog up near Newcastle and ended up camping in the graveyard by accident.

Creepy.

But this is different. For one thing, it's not really a holiday. For another, Evans is asleep on his chest. For a third, her parents are occupying the room _right next door_.

Which is sort of a buggering nuisance, all things considered.

He couldn't not come. Not after she turns up on his doorstep in a bridesmaid's dress, white and shaking: _you have to stop me I'm going to kill her I really am_. He'd laughed at her once when she told him that Petunia ruined everything she touched, but never again. It even extends to the girl's own wedding.

He's still not entirely clear on what happened, exactly. He's not sure anybody is, apart from the Evans sisters themselves. There was a fight - obviously - and Petunia threw something at Lily - there's a bruise on her shoulder - and knowing Evans, knowing her reactions and her reflexes the way he does (fought with her, fought beside her, learned from and taught her), she probably came within a hair's breadth of hexing Petunia straight into St Mungo's and out the other side into the graveyard, and that, he suspects, is when she Apparated to his place.

The other thing James Potter isn't entirely clear on is how they got from _let's never leave this room again _to, well, this room that they're actually in, instead of the other one they weren't going to leave. That's weddings for you, they make people do ridiculous things.

(The idea that one day he and Lily -)

She shifts and sighs into his shoulder.

"Awake?"

"Hmm," she groans. "Whyyyyy?"

How's your shoulder, are you hungry, can I get you anything?

Problem with being - with going out with Evans is that he's never really thought about it in great detail before - not beyond _she's gorgeous and I love her _- and now he has her mad sister to deal with and her Dad who's none too impressed with the way he teases her in public and how she never wears pyjamas because she prefers to kip in his shirts and the fact that she eats porridge for breakfast, which is so abhominably boring there aren't words for it as well as all these instincts telling him to treat her like a china doll when he knows perfectly well she hates that - and even if it didn't, it would never have occurred to him to do it before they - _before_, what the sodding hell is wrong with him? She's not Mum, to be cosseted and have doors held open for her and ice packs put on her aching head when she comes home in the evenings.

James is busy adjusting his whole concept of long-term relationships right now. For _her_. (Pathetic. On the other hand, he always hated being sent to get Mum those ice packs.)

"You drank too much," he says instead.

"You opened the Firewhiskey."

"You looked like you needed it. Just not quite that much."

She laughs. "Thanks for this."

"For what?"

"Comin' back here with me."

"Evans," he says extravagantly, "I'd follow you to the ends of the Earth. Only, you know, in a romantic way, not a weird one."

Lily laughs again, full-throated and smoky. "Three years ago you would not have added that disclaimer."

"It was my understanding that's why you're going out with me now and not three years ago."

She pats his chest. "Your understanding is not as deficient as I once believed."

"Dear Merlin, a compliment. Be still, my beating heart - one nice word from you and I see stars, Lily, I really do. Fireworks explode across my vision."

She hides her face in his shoulder; hers are shaking with giggles. Wand-callused thumb and forefinger brush his ribs, slide under his shirt, and he shivers at her cold deft fingers on his skin. "Thank you," she says again. "Oh, James. Thank you."

He rolls over, drops her into the curve of his body, slings his leg across her thighs. "Imagine if you _had _gone out with the giant squid. _He _wouldn't be here right now."

Another burst of giggles, dancing warm across his neck, his collarbone. "Tomorrow," she says, "will you help me with something?"

"Course I will."

Grin. He can feel it - taste it in the darkness, under his fingers. "I want to turn every single bridesmaid's dress in this place, and all Petunia's things, and every tablecloth and towel and the sodding pink bunting in the reception room _black_."

James pauses. "Nah," he says. "Green. Match your eyes. I'll do the bunting and the tablecloths if you do the dresses."

"Match my eyes?"

"You've got fantastic eyes, Evans."

"Hmm," she says again. "Listen, when we get married, I'm not inviting Tuney and I'm not having a six-tier wedding cake that looks like the spectator stands from the local cricket pitch gone wrong and covered in icing."

(One day, he and Lily.)

"Don't tell me," he says. "Tell Sirius. He's best man."

"You what?"

"The best man arranges the wedding. My Dad arranged Uncle Charlie and Aunt Dorea's and it was pandemonium. I fell in the duck pond at one point. I was only about three, it was the best day ever."

"No! Not really? What about the bride?"

James is honestly puzzled. "You mean Muggle girls have to arrange their own weddings?"

"It's considered the thing, yes." Lily's propped up on an elbow now, grinning down at him.

"Bloody hell. Well I mean, what's the point of having a best man? That's what they're for, to take all that crap off your hands."

"I think Muggles assume the best man is there to stop the groom from running away."

"Oh," says James. "Oh, well. We definitely won't be needing Sirius for that."

Her hair is falling over her shoulders; he catches a red-auburn handful of it and lets it run thick and warm through his fingers. "When we buy the rings," she says, "would it be all right if we had silver?"

"Silver tarnishes," says James. (Silver's Slytherin.)

Lily flushes - just a bit. "Yes," she says. "But it makes me think of you - of you in the Forest, you know, at Halloween, and how your eyes looked, and - everything."

Everything: her mouth on his, and the way she shivered and clung to him against the wind, and how she let him carry her up a whole flight of stairs under the Cloak until they both collapsed at the top in stitches and fits of silly, joyful, delighted laughter.

"All right," he says. "Silver. Will you please finally let me buy you jewellery as well? A bracelet, or earrings, or a necklace to hang here."

He touches his fingertips to the dip between her collarbones, under her throat. She dips her head and kisses the back of his hand, hair falling into his face.

"I might."


End file.
